Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

This paper casts doubt on empirical results based on panel estimations of an "inverted-U" relationship between per capita GDP and pollution. Using a new data set for OECD countries on carbon dioxide emissions for the period 1960-1997, we find that the crucial assumption of homogeneity across...

Contest designers or managers who want to maximize the overall revenue of a contest (relative performance scheme) are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of contestants with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S.. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...